This seems like a relativity simple 'task' but maintaining it seems to a bit of a hassle.

We have a weekly recurring that involves almost all of the office staff in a given location. This meeting has been scheduled to run every week for the entire year. When the meeting was setup, it was sent out to a distribution list.

Initial setup of a meeting like this is not a problem. Maintenance as people come and go from the company becomes a headache, since the new hires get added to the meeting invite individually and create an opportunity for NDR's if they leave and someone replies to the meeting (not normal

Lately we've also begun having incidents where some members of the invitee group will get an 'Forward on behalf of the original sender'. The 'offending sender' has never admitted to knowing what they might have done to have trigger the message being sent. Best as we can tell the message is coming from their mailbox.

There is the desire to have it as a calendar event, so people's calendars can be blocked out for that time, An efficient way to manage changes in the meeting attendees dynamically seems to be elusive.

Anyone else dealing with this and have a solution they'd recommend? One internal thought had been to create an event on the shared company calendar (running on Sharepoint) and encouraging employees to become 'add the event' to their own calendars. We are running on O365.

4 Replies

O365 has dynamic groups. With those it checks AD for a current list every time you send to the group. NDRs don't happen. All you need to do is add an AD attribute to all the users you want in the group so you have something to base the group on.

I'm trying the dynamic group in other places, but I don't think that will work for a meeting invite that gets sent out once

Why not? The meeting invite is just an email, right?

Oh wait... when someone new comes in they won't get the initial invite and if you add them individually, you run into the same issues as before. But.. they will get any emails sent to that group. What if they manually add the meeting instead of being invited? They should still get any updates sent to the group, right?

You could send them an ICS file for it instead of an invite, for instance. They double click to add it to their calendar, saving them from having to manually do it.

Oh wait... when someone new comes in they won't get the initial invite and if you add them individually, you run into the same issues as before. But.. they will get any emails sent to that group. What if they manually add the meeting instead of being invited? They should still get any updates sent to the group, right?

You could send them an ICS file for it instead of an invite, for instance. They double click to add it to their calendar, saving them from having to manually do it.

You see my challenge on the first part, since the meeting request only gets sent once, people that join the company after it's sent are not going to receive it.

Saving out an ICS file of the meeting sounds like one way to accomplish the goal.